magyarul
It was hundred and twenty years and three days ago, on 31 May 1891 that the Russian crown prince, later Tsar Nicholas II in Vladivostok placed the foundation stone of the Trans-Siberian Railroad.

In the extra three days I was waiting for some new, exciting material to pop up on the Russian net for the round anniversary, but it seems that the best available documents were already published on the hundred and tenth anniversary. At that time I also collected a large archive material on the construction and early years of the railway which now I began to gradually publish. Now I will start with those people who placed the foundation stones subsequent to that of Tsarevich Nicholas, not to mention the sleepers and the ballast: the forced laborers.

Igor Rasteryaev: Russian Way. The title-giving song of the CD Русская дорога (2011).

On the convicts building the Trans-Siberian Railroad between 1891 and 1903 several photos survived, not only by Russian photographers, but – what only twenty years later would have been unthinkable – by American photographers as well, and by one of the best known contemporary American photographers at that, William Henry Jackson (1843-1942).

In the USA Jackson became famous as the photographer of the West from the end of the 1860s when, by traveling all along the Union Pacific Railroad, he took ten thousand photos on behalf of Edward Anthony in New York, which were then distributed in several albums and prints. It is not so well known, however, that thanks to his experiences as an outdoor and railway photographer, between 1894 and 1896 he also signed with the World’s Transportation Commission to take photos of the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the Far East.

A series of these photos are kept in the L. Tom Perry special collection of the Library of Brigham Young University which also published a part of them in their database. From there they were collected out by one-way, and from her borrowed by us. Since the meaningful details of the large glass negatives would be lost in small size, therefore we include only the central cuts in the page, and by clicking on them you can see the entire photo in a larger size.

Jackson also photographed the post stations where they changed sledge equipages, together with the coachmen, horses, inn-keepers and camel caravans.

A camel caravan crossing the frozen Amur

The construction of the track of the railway starting from Vladivostok at that time was about the middle reach of the Russian-Chinese border river Amur – in Chinese 黑龙江, Hēilóngjiāng, “Black Dragon”. This region, marked with a red dot on the map, has been traditionally inhabited by the fishing tribes of Tunguz Nanais, mentioned as “fish-skin clothed Tatars” in earlier sources. It was just at that time, in consequence of the railroad constructions, that Russian ethnographers also started to discover this region, including Vladimir Arsenev who in his famous novel published in 1923 set a memory to his old Nanai guide between 1902 and 1907, Dersu Uzala. The American expedition also passed through this region and made several photos on the Nanai fishermen. To Jackson, who during his roaming in the American West had lived and photographed for decades between American Natives, this must have been a well known situation which is also attested by his relaxed and informal photos. I do not know whether at that time – and in sight of the soon following changes, at any time – it was given to anyone else to take photos among the native inhabitants of both the farthest West and the farthest East.

Thanks a lot, also in advance for future corrections. I’ve now replaced it. Yes, the importance of ballast was so pivotal in the imperial logistics that also the languages of the former Monarchy had special terms for it: Splitt in German and zúzalék in Hungarian.

Fascinating pictures at a transition in a (hard) way of life, The field work evidently did Jackson no harm, living just short of 100 years. One could get absorbed picture by picture! I went back to the William Henry Jackson collection at Brigham Young for further limited description, and hand-written notes from the back of the pictures. There's the occasional Western person (from the Transportation Commission?) in some of the pictures, while a few Amur pictures show some huge fish (Sturgeon?) almost incidental to the composition. There is at least one cigarette smoking man, but several women with long pipes with small bowls clamped between their teeth. What they made of the American entourage we can only guess. Truly memorable, Studiolum, thank you.

My great-grandfather used to work on the nascent Transsib as a watchmaker in Irkutsk, where the railroad brought the need for precision time measurement into the wilds of Siberia. It was before the 1905 abolishment of the Pale and Siberia, being officially not a part of Russia proper and thus not falling under the Pale restrictions, offered awesome employment opportunities to adventurous Jewish youth. It ended during Russo-Japanese War when the Imperial government jailed him for peace agitation, but the Ohranka archives, declassified in the recent years, revealed to our surprised family that gramps Wolf remained involved with the Eastern Siberian socialists for a fairly long time after that episode.

It's a long story, Studiolum, partly retold in two books, one English, another Russian, and in some old magazine publications. But I'm - what a strange coincidence - actively planning to refresh parts the tale soon, hopefully with pictures. Next month in Geneva, where Wolf fled just days before being outed by the czarist secret police, and then in August in Moscow, where I hope to digitize a load of old documents. Stay tuned.

OK, I got a photo portrait of 20 year old Wolf Prousse aka Vladimir Osipovich Pruss, taken in Irkutsk in 1904, and the pages from his Czarist Okhranka dossier from its Irkutsk department. So I guess I can get started, bit by bit. How do I get access?

Working on it :) Улита едет, когда-то будет ... I definitely got sidetracked by the stories which followed, typed up a WWII piece instead, and scanned pics from the 1920s, but I'm getting back to 1904 soon!